Chapter 135: The Question Everyone Paid For
The subpoenas arrived a day apart, one from each side, like two invitations to the same funeral.
Dale drove down for it. Vera asked if she should bake something, which is how Vera prays.
I told her yes. Cinnamon. It would not change the record, but it would change the house.
Garrett's lawyers called Grant first. They still believed their own story about him.
Adaeze called him second, out of courtesy, and then did a thing I had never seen her do.
She laughed.
They think he is theirs, she said. Let them. We will prepare him for both.
I asked her which side worried her more.
The one asking first, she said. Friendly fire is still fire.
The preparation happened in Adaeze's conference room, over three evenings.
I stayed out. As the former spouse at the center of their theory, I would have turned preparation into performance.
Dale went instead, as his friend, and gave me the account afterward, when Grant was off the stand.
He made flash cards, Dale told me afterward, delighted. His own handwriting. Questions on one side, documents on the other.
The man is studying for his own life.
Adaeze ran him hard, Dale said. She played Garrett's counsel. She played the judge. Once she played me, which he said was the scariest part.
Grant never broke rhythm.
Once, Dale said, Grant stopped mid-answer and asked for the exhibit number himself. Adaeze closed her eyes like a woman at church.
There was a time, Dale said, when he prepped for a room by learning the room.
Now he preps by learning the record. You did that to him, in case nobody has said it.
The morning of his testimony, I saw him in the courthouse corridor.
It was the first time we had been alone in the same ten feet of air since his letter.
He wore the good suit, the one I used to send to the cleaner. It hung differently now. He had earned it back the slow way.
He stopped. For a second he was fifteen years of mornings, and then he was just a witness with a folder.
Nora, he said.
Grant, I said.
That was almost all of it. Two professionals in a hallway, on opposite sides of nothing anymore.
Almost.
Trust your file, I said.
He almost smiled.
I learned from the best, he said.
Then the bailiff called his name, and the doors took him.
I took my seat between Ruth and Vera. Vera's gloved hand found mine under the bench and stayed.
From there I watched Grant take the oath with the care of someone signing what he had actually read.
Garrett's lead counsel did the direct, friendly as a loan officer.
He led Grant through the divorce gently, confident he knew where every answer would go.
The firm. The suspension. The audit. The cardboard box on the sidewalk that the whole city had watched him carry.
Grant answered each one plainly. Yes. Yes. That is correct.
No varnish. That was new too.
The lawyer arranged his face into sympathy and leaned on the rail.
Just a few more, he said. I know this is hard.
It is not hard, Grant said. It is just mine.
A small sound went through the gallery. Even the judge looked up.
The lawyer smiled then, the smile of a man reaching for the knife he has been warming all morning.
I had seen that smile before. Across a dinner table, on the night of the oysters.
He let the pause stretch.
Mr. Wexler, he said.
Did your ex-wife destroy you?
The court reporter's fingers stopped.
And at the back of it, coat folded over his arm, the silver man waited for the answer he had paid for.